Do you give good feedback?

Guttman Development Strategies, led by Howard M. Guttman, is a partner of CCY and focused on helping clients become high performance organizations. One of the key strategies to accomplishing this is providing good performance feedback.

Whether it’s a team member providing feedback to a supervisor, or the more traditional top-down performance review, Gutman recommends the same approach:

Start with a qualifying conversation.

“There are issues I’ve been noticing”

“Are you open to discussing them”? Supervisors may be able to say when the conversation is over and that a recommendation is not debatable in ways that employees can’t, but everyone should still lead with the same qualifying questions.

Be constructive

Outline the issues being noticed

Discuss a game plan for moving forward

Put it in writing

Follow-up with an email to help ensure everyone’s on the same page

Include in annual written review as necessary

It’s important that the process goes in this order. Face-to-face feedback should be the norm and ongoing. Written feedback like an annual review should never be a surprise. And of course, feedback in any direction should never start with an email.